“The king created the Great Beguinage as a home for pious women, so many of whom had been left alone in those times. Knights’ wives condemned to widowhood by Crusades and private wars, young noblewomen who could neither marry not enter the costly convents for lack of a dowry. And those poorer still — the women who worked as carders or weavers in the surrounding wool workshops and who would be reassured each night to be able to come back to the shelter of its high walls.
“ 'Are you really going to be happy among those good souls?' her son had joked when Ysabel had announced her intention to retire there. 'You, my mother, who gallops cross-country and speaks her mind, sparing neither man nor beast her tongue!'
“ 'I will master my tongue, and old age will do the same for my impatience,' was her simple reply.
“… She left him the management of her estate and gave the keys to her house to her daughter-in-law. He did not understand that she was going away. He had been born into a world that seemed self-evident to him, while she had learnt that time had transformed its boundaries and its contours.
“At the Beguinage she found more than she was hoping for…. At first she prepared medicines for the infirmary, then when the supervisor of the infirmary died, she agreed to succeed her in that office. She is also part of the council of four wise women who advise the mistress and help administer the institution.
“Sometimes she misses the green of the meadows in spring, the leaves crunching under the shoes of her horse in the autumn, the dusty odour of the threshed wheat stocked in the barn in winter. But she does not regret a thing. She welcomes the dreams that visit her. And repays what she was given.”
